


Sovereignty

by Quill_of_Thoth



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: (genetically modified space bee culture), Alien Culture, Hive dynamics, Honey, I'm not sure anything in this fandom actually qualifies as crack, POV Outsider, because they're space bees, despite rampant anthropomorphization, reasonably accurate bees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 19:02:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3422102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quill_of_Thoth/pseuds/Quill_of_Thoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Apini Queen recognizes Jupiter's sovereignty.</p><p>(Or: Space Bees, the ficlet.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sovereignty

It was a beautiful, lazy day in late May at the Apini hives. The workers buzzed from flower to flower, collecting nectar and pollen, or meditatively stirred the honey. The Apini queen was busy looking over the newest brood, waving her antennae back and forth as the nurse bees rushed pollen from cell to cell these here, her fine strong daughters, would be workers in only three or four nights,  and this new set she had laid that morning would join their sisters in another fourteen days. Perhaps in a few nights, if the conditions were right for swarming, she would have the workers build queen cups. Only the strongest of her daughters would emerge victorious, and soon there would be a new hive.

While she was rubbing her forelegs along the edge of a recently cleaned brood cell (spotless – she tolerated nothing less)she felt the hive dance change. The outfliers had detected something unusual, something that excited them. It wasn’t the honey-taker, but another of those large, blundering creatures, something that her outfliers should know better than to concentrate on when they had millions of unharvested flowers to locate and plunder for pollen and nectar. She vibrated her wings so that the hive would soon know her displeasure at workers who buzzed about instead of working, yet she was curious. It had been a long time since anything had so excited her hive, agitated them towards the distraction of swarming, and she had laid no new queens since before the long cold.

She lifted her antennae and detected a whiff, just a faint brush of the pheromone of reign. It wasn’t hers – it was too weak to be a recognized queen, too strong and faintly alien to be an emergent heir of her own – and it was overlaid with the smell of blundering beast-fear, of burning air and metal traveling things.

Somewhere in the Apini queen’s meticulously ordered, genetically enhanced mind, the smell slotted itself in and unlocked an instinct, passed down from her own mother who was stung to death by her retainers to ensure the sucession of a new, stronger ruler.

Although the chemical signals in the brain of a bee did not quite translate into words, the gist of the message was this: _This blundering thing is a queen in her own right. She is young, untested, and in danger from other beast-things, without retainers and scouts and warriors to defend her, without workers to feed her and her brood._

Twitching her mandibles, the Apini queen released a detailed pheromone, instructing her scouts and defenders to be on guard, to acknowledge the strange beast-queen that had stumbled into her domain. So long as she took her beast-workers away from here without harming the hive, the Apini Regna was fully prepared to acknowledge this virgin queen’s sovereignty.

**Author's Note:**

> Aside from the anthropomorphization, all bee facts contained in this fic are reasonably accurate to the best of my knowledge. (Queens do, in fact, try to stab each other to death upon emerging from their brood cell: it reminds me of the Abraxas family, actually.)


End file.
